How the Universally and Naturally-Lived Experience Evolved into an Aesthetic Experience in John Dewey’s Thought: An Exposition

John Dewey, the American pragmatist philosopher, was an experimentalist when he introduced the pragmatic foundations of his thought. For him, experience is a key that opens the gates of aesthetics to him and all else. The telling title of his famous work, Art as Experience (1958), is evidence that for Dewey art is an experience while beauty is an event happening in the context of human life experiences. Focusing on Art as Experience, which is analytic in form and romantic in content, this paper seeks to explain how the experience of art developed and transformed in Dewey's thought. Then we illustrate how an aesthetic experience, by drawing on the possibilities the natural world and everyday life offer, can become accessible to human beings. Thus Dewy, as the philosopher of life, turns into a source of expression about art and beauty.